The Second Sister: The exciting new psychological thriller from Sunday Times bestselling author Claire Kendal

Bonfire Night

It is after seven by the time I have finished my daily run, followed by my usual sit-ups and presses and pull-ups and stretches. I have barely stepped out of the shower before I hear Luke’s keys in the locks, then the front door of my little Victorian house crashing open and his shout, ‘Stay out of the way, Auntie Ella. Back in a minute.’

I shrug off the oversized towelling bathrobe that Ted left with me shortly before you disappeared. It is navy blue. It is so big I used to wrap me and Luke in it together when he was a baby and I wandered through the house late at night, trying to lull him out of crying and into sleep. There are holes and loose threads from uncountable washes, but this old thing of Ted’s is an object of comfort to me still.

I shimmy into a jumper and jeans, tie my wet hair into a ponytail, and fly down the stairs to the sight of Luke and our father, lurching sideways into the hall. They are each clutching one side of the doll’s house, which is shaped like a medium-sized chest of drawers. Ted is rear and centre, taking most of the weight. Above Ted’s head, in the clear black night that followed the afternoon storm, there is an explosion of silver stars. They fall from the sky as if to announce him.

Luke cranes his neck to watch. ‘Awesome,’ he says.

‘Luke asked me to help.’ Ted says this like an apology. He looks at Luke, not me, when he speaks, and a wave of sickness moves through my body.

Somebody on my street has lit a bonfire. The air is thick with smoke. Ash floats into the house. My eyes are burning. I blink and rub them. I think of the disappointed embarrassment that coloured my parting from Ted on Monday night, after trick-or-treating and dinner, which I see now he only went through for Luke.

‘Ted came out to Granny and Grandpa’s tonight,’ Luke says. ‘He helped us get the doll’s house down from the attic and into Grandpa’s van. He followed us here.’

‘That was kind.’ I am moving backwards, up the stairs again, out of their way.

‘Luke and I could have managed,’ our father says. I wink at Luke without our father seeing.

Once the doll’s house is in Luke’s room, there is a great deal of whooping and high-fiving between our father and your son and my furtive ex-boyfriend.

‘So what have you and your aunt got planned for tomorrow?’ It is infinitely easier for Ted to talk to Luke than to me.

‘How about the zoo?’ I say.

‘Yessssss,’ Luke says. He puts out a hand for some more high-fiving with Ted.

‘Luke and I will run to the van to get the box.’ Our father is trying to channel our mother’s matchmaking impulses but not managing her social smoothness. Ted and I stand awkwardly in Luke’s room after they are gone, looking at our own feet.

My heart is squeezing as if I were a teenaged girl about to ask a boy to a dance. But what I have to say is not at all romantic, and it hardly matters anyway because it doesn’t seem possible to piss Ted off any more than I already have. Besides, it’s not like I will lose him – I have been there and done that several times over – and it looks as if I am about to repeat the experience. Once that happens my chance of learning what I need to will vanish forever.

‘Tell me about her laptop,’ I say. ‘Tell me what they found on it.’

He actually sighs. ‘You will never stop.’

‘No. But I am willing to say please if it helps.’

‘I wouldn’t want you to do something so unnatural.’ He shakes his head slowly. ‘You won’t believe me.’

‘Try me.’

‘They found nothing. The laptop’s empty.’

‘Then why are they holding on to it? Why does it still matter to them?’

‘I said you wouldn’t believe me. It’s lose-lose with you, no matter what I do.’

‘I am not the one making it lose-lose for us.’ My fingers are fidgety and nervous, brushing hair from my eyes that isn’t there because it is already pulled into a ponytail.

‘What the hell is that supposed to mean?’

‘You know exactly what.’

‘Is there something you want to get off your chest, Ella?’

‘No.’ For now, I want the power of having knowledge without his knowing that I do. ‘So why did you make such a big deal of refusing to tell me about the laptop if there’s nothing to tell? Was it some kind of power game for you?’

‘Low blow. That was beneath you. When I say there was nothing, I mean that whatever is there is hidden. Tech have kept the laptop in the hope that some future tool might uncover something.’

‘You’re saying she used the laptop, but everything she ever did on it is invisible?’

‘So far as I can understand, yes. One of the things they think she did was to use an onion router to mask all of her online activity.’

My amazement actually drives the photograph and the café and Ruby from my head. ‘But that’s impossible. She wouldn’t know what an onion router is.’ My head snaps up. ‘What is an onion router?’

‘You’re talking deep web. That internet world where nothing leaves a trace anywhere. None of the search engines you’d recognise.’

‘But she was seriously useless at technology.’

‘Evidently not.’

‘But she can’t have done that. If MI5 gave her a spying device she wouldn’t know how to turn it on.’

‘Well she did. And it wasn’t the kind of technology ordinary people have access to.’

‘Then someone else set it up and taught her. We need to know who. And why.’

I spend my days warning women of the importance of guarding their privacy to keep safe. But your skill at doing this – your talent for secrets – might have been the very thing that put you in jeopardy. Did you continue your conversation with Jason Thorne that way, after the phone calls the tabloids said you made to him?

Ted is frowning. ‘You’re going dangerously quiet.’

‘Just thinking. Thank you for telling me. I mean it.’

‘Don’t drop me or Mike in it.’

‘I won’t. I never would. You know that.’

‘I know you wouldn’t want to, but you might not be able to help yourself.’

‘I’ll be careful for you. I’d always be careful for you.’ And of you, I silently add.

He doesn’t look convinced. ‘That’s the end of it. Don’t ask me for more.’

This is not a promise I can make, so I change the subject in the crudest way possible, mostly for Luke’s sake, but partly for my own. ‘Will you stay for pizza?’

‘I’d like to but I have to be somewhere.’ He glances at his watch and I imagine Ruby waiting for him in a French restaurant, or in her little house, where she has cooked him dinner and lit candles. ‘Half an hour ago, actually.’ Ted is wearing black jeans and a black shirt and something that smells of woods. Even yesterday, I might have secretly hoped these things were for me, but today I know they are not.

‘Next time,’ I say.

‘Yeah,’ Ted says.

‘My dad … Thank you …’

‘I know, Ella. You don’t need to say.’

Pandora’s Box

Dad leaves with his phone to his ear, talking to Mum in a hushed voice. Luke wants to get straight to the box, but he is still sweaty from his afternoon karate lesson so I make him take a shower first.

‘Fastest shower ever,’ I say, when I walk into his room to find him waiting for me. He is wearing the football club pyjamas I bought for him a few weeks ago, and they make him look achingly sweet and young. He is sitting in front of the giant oak wardrobe that used to be yours, cross-legged on carpet that was also yours. I had these moved here from your flat three years ago when our parents were finally able to sell it and close your bank accounts and put the money safely away for Luke.

The carpet is pale beige, with a white trellis pattern, and beautiful, like everything you choose. Luke loves the fact that it was in the Georgian flat where the two of you lived together for such a short time.

I sit across from Luke and lift the lid of the cardboard box between us. ‘Should we start?’

‘Have I told you lately that you’re brilliant, Auntie Ella?’

I raise my arms and tilt my head to the side, an upper-body-only curtain call, careful at the same time not to spill any of the Mexican beer I’m holding in my right hand. I take a sip.

‘I’ve heard Granny tell you that ladies should never drink from bottles.’

Even wet from the shower, Luke’s funny cowlick is as unruly as ever, a tight swirl above his left temple. I poke a finger into its centre and twizzle it around until he laughs. ‘I’m not a lady.’

‘Granny told Grandpa before we left that he wasn’t allowed to drink.’

‘She worries about his health, Luke. And she knew he was driving.’

‘Beer is made of sugar. Cancer cells love sugar.’ Your son’s imitation of our mother is terrifyingly good. I try not to laugh but I can’t stop myself. I nearly spray Luke with a mouthful of liquid death.

‘Can I have a sip?’ he says.

‘No! But nice try. Smoothly done.’

He pauses to watch a dazzling waterfall of blue pouring into the night, followed by a streak of red fire zinging upwards like a reverse comet and screaming all the way. ‘Please will you take me next year?’ He is still staring out the window.

‘I hope so. I’ll keep talking to Granny.’

Luke rolls his eyes and turns back to the box. The cardboard has thinned in places, where sticky tape ripped off layers. ‘Do you think Granny’s looked through it?’

‘No – I asked – she said she didn’t.’ But I’m sure she has. I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s actually taken something out. I have already snuck a phone call to her to ask this very thing, but she will not depart from her little charade that she never even looked inside.

I am not sure what we are expecting. Some obvious clue the police missed? Presumably they have already combed it all for DNA.

‘What’s this?’ Luke is holding a scrap of soft white wool, edged in silk and fraying.

I reach out a finger to touch it, smiling. ‘The sole surviving piece of Mummy’s baby blanket. She used to tuck it into your cot with you.’

He buries his face in it, then jumps up and sticks it beneath his pillow. ‘Please know that I will have to kill you if you tell anyone.’

‘Never.’ I glance at the doll’s house, half-expecting to see a spectral glow behind the paned windows. ‘Will you mind having this if you bring friends back here? You won’t be embarrassed?’

‘Nah. I’ll say it’s yours and you insist on keeping it in my room.’

‘Well that’s true.’

‘Part of the truth. Not all.’ He gives me a look. ‘I learned that from you. And Granny. Probably not from Grandpa, though.’

I think of our father’s secret request for the police to return your things. Luke and I wouldn’t have this box at all, if it weren’t for him. ‘Your grandpa is a man of many wonders. I think your grandpa is a visionary.’

‘He’s the master puppeteer.’

I look at him in surprise. ‘He is, yes. Though few people guess. Which is why he is so effective.’

Luke picks up a pink plastic compact. ‘What’s this?’

‘Some kind of travel mirror? Face powder or blush, maybe?’ All of your make-up had designer labels on the containers, but this doesn’t. ‘Shall we see?’

‘Yep.’ He finds the clasp and it opens like a clam shell. Inside is a circle of pills, faded in colour. Each pill is numbered, to keep track of the days of a lunar month. Numbers 1 through 21 are pale yellow. Numbers 22 through 28 are light blue. The two of us squint at them. ‘Same question, again, Auntie Ella. What is this?’

I gulp so much beer the bottle depletes by two inches. ‘They’re birth control pills. Women use them so they can have sex without getting pregnant.’

He makes a face and thrusts the container at me as if we were playing hot potato. ‘Do you think Mummy used them?’

‘Probably, but she must have taken a break from them. Which is an extremely lucky thing for all of us. Because she wanted to have you.’

All at once, he flushes. His nose begins to run. He looks down.

My heart begins to beat faster. ‘What’s wrong, Luke?’

But he can’t speak. I scoot close to him and he climbs onto my lap and I cradle him as if he were a baby, though he is bony and gangly. He sniffles onto my shoulder while I hold him tighter and rock back and forth, kissing the top of his head. His hair smells like the shower gel Ted uses – he must have persuaded Ted to get some for him.

Luke pulls away to catch my eye. His own are red. ‘You won’t stop looking at things again because I got upset?’ He wipes his nose on a pyjama sleeve.

‘No. I won’t do that.’

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